Ron Wyden, Mark Udall continue to sound alarm on privacy

For years, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been lonely voices warning against massive government surveillance activities.

On Wednesday, a report in the British newspaper The Guardian made their alarms look prescient: The National Security Agency has ordered Verizon to turn over the phone records of millions of Americans every day.

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Wyden, Udall and a few civil libertarian colleagues are part of a small band of critics in a Congress still dominated by lawmakers willing to give the federal government enormous leeway nearly 12 years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The two Democrats, both members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, didn’t get into specifics on Thursday. They’ve been careful not to disclose the details of a program in the shadows — and that makes it hard for the program’s critics to come into the light.

But they continued their broad critique of the government’s tactics.

”I will tell you from a policy standpoint, when a law-abiding citizen makes a call, they expect that who they call, when they call and where they call from will be kept private,” Wyden told POLITICO. “As a result of the publications today, there’s going to be a big debate about this, and I think it’s appropriate.”

Udall added: “The administration I think owes it to the American public to comment on what authorities it thinks it has.”

Meanwhile, Capitol Hill reaction to the NSA news was relatively muted — if not supportive of the Obama administration’s activities. House and Senate intelligence committee leaders said the program had been going on for seven years. Many members of Congress had been read in yet hadn’t raised red flags, and House Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said the information helped thwart terrorist plots.

Senior administration officials went into overdrive to brief lawmakers about the program and appeared to successfully soften the rhetoric from a number of critics, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. And even critics acknowledged there is little chance that this Congress would react to the revelations by trying to impose more restrictions on federal surveillance power in order to protect Americans’ civil liberties.

“I could say right now that we could step right up and change the law, but it’s not likely to happen,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who has previously criticized and sought to overhaul the section of the statute now at issue.

That component of the law — Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act — allows the government to secretly obtain approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for “tangible things” related to an authorized terrorism investigation. The Justice Department has repeatedly said the program is subject to court approval — and that lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees are regularly briefed on such activities.

But in the previous Congress, Udall and Wyden repeatedly warned that the secret court had expansively interpreted the section of the law and effectively given the administration an array of powers Congress never intended.

“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the PATRIOT Act,” the duo wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder in March 2012. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

Wyden, a 64-year-old Oregon Democrat who has served in the Senate since 1996, has in recent years built a reputation for opposing efforts to infringe on civil liberties, including stopping online piracy and the administration’s drone program. And Udall, a 62-year-old Colorado Democrat in his first term, has tried to carve out an image as a more moderate Democrat in line with his state and its libertarian streak.

“Mark Udall, myself and Wyden — look where we come from, we come from different kind of states,” said Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska).

As members of the Intelligence Committee, Udall and Wyden have access to classified information that most members of Congress do not. But it was unclear Thursday just how many lawmakers knew about the extent of the phone records effort before the Guardian’s report, despite claims by Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on Intelligence, and other supporters of the NSA program that every member had been briefed on it.

Rubio, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), all members of the Intelligence Committee, claimed to be unaware of the program until The Guardian revealed its existence Wednesday. Members of the Senate Democratic leadership, Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Patty Murray of Washington, also said they weren’t clued in either.